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Amid the
general incoherence of the Tea Party rebels and the failure of progressives
to recognize the structural changes underway in a peak oil world, lies a
deadly swamp of paradox where all parties may drown in the quicksand of their
own muddled intentions.
The Tea Party appeals to the swelling numbers of the new former middle class
angry at the sudden vanishing of their accustomed perqs
and entitlements to a predictably comfortable suburban existence. They're mad
at the government and hot for "liberty." But how do they propose to
maintain the hyper-complexities of suburban life without taxes to pay for
fixing the countless roads their lives depend on or to run the gold-plated
central school districts that seem to exist solely to provide Friday night
football? As for liberty, a handful of despotic corporations from McDonalds
to WalMart have been granted the liberty to destroy
the Tea-bagger's bodies and the economic fabric of their communities -- and
they seem to want more of that kind of liberty, based on the recent decision
of a "conservative" majority on the Supreme Court allowing
corporations to buy elections. The Tea-baggers also apparently crave the
liberty to push other people around, especially on questions of abortion and
religion. That's an interesting kind of freedom.
As
more and more of them lose jobs and incomes, will they resent their
government-issued extended unemployment benefits? I doubt that you'll see
them burning their own checks in big public demonstrations the way the
Vietnam War protesters burned their draft cards. And of course this also goes
for the retiree Tea-baggers who show up at their Tea Parties to inveigh
against the government -- except the agency that prints their social security
checks, or the other one that pays for their liver transplants (while
40-million unretired, un-insured Americans under sixty-five get slammed with extortionary hospital bills for twenty-thousand dollar
routine appendectomies that end up bankrupting them).
Meanwhile, the progressives led by President Obama are doing everything
possible to deny the deep tectonic changes thundering through our economic
arrangements. They have embarked on a campaign to sustain the unsustainable
that will only aggravate and accelerate the more destructive effects of the
historic changes underway. For instance, the financial crisis is nature's way
of telling us that banking occupies too much space in our economy --
especially the "creative" kind of banking which thrives on innovations
in fraud and swindles. Yet the progressives are shoveling the nation's
accumulated savings (and way beyond that to earnings-not-yet-saved) into a
handful of gigantic banks whose employees live in a separate universe of
luxury, and the bail-outs only guarantee more financial mischief based on
efforts to get something-for-nothing -- in the absence of an economy that
turns capital investment into things of value.
Faced with the multiple threats of peak oil, the progressives are pounding
billions into the automobile makers and shoveling tons of stimulus money into
highway improvement projects, while the railroads we will desperately need in
the future continue to be starved to death, and no effort is made to promote walkable communities -- including a federally-led reform
of our insane zoning laws which mandate a suburban development outcome in
every corner of the country.
Faced with the hangover of a housing bubble, the president's team has
insidiously nationalized the racket and is doing everything possible to keep
housing prices unrealistically inflated, so that nobody still lucky enough to
have a median income can afford the median price of a house. Meanwhile, the
agencies used to facilitate this accounting shell game -- Fannie Mae, Freddie
Mac, Ginnie Mae, etc. -- are choking on worthless
mortgage contracts and generating ever more new toxic mortgage paper.
Then, there is the question of our military adventures half a world away in
Afghanistan and Iraq, where both parties are unwilling to face the basic
conundrum of what happens when our troops leave those places. Even if we
stamp out the current Taliban leadership there are countless avid
up-and-comers burning to take their places, and numberless mountain valleys
for them to hide in. Al Qaeda, of course, exists mainly as an international
computer network. Good luck stamping that out. And if it's oil we're after in
Iraq, there are three main possibilities after the last US soldier packs out: one
is the unlikely possibility that a competent Iraqi national oil company
decides to dole out drilling licenses to "preferred" companies
(don't hold your breath Exxon-Mobil); another is that Iraq cracks up
into smaller ethnic units lacking the capital or coherence to get their oil
out of the ground; and a third is that neighboring Iran comes to
control the major oil-producing region around Basra. So, what's it all
about, Alfie? -- besides
squandering a trillion dollars we don't really have.
Homeland security? Neither party is serious about defending
the borders or limiting immigration, and anyway there are
"soft" targets beyond counting all over the USA and small arms
galore available to get the job done. Three guys with automatic rifles set
loose in the Mall of America would be enough to push the retail sector over
the edge into oblivion, taking with it the commercial real estate market and
all the banks involved in financing it -- in short, destroying the tattered
remains of the so-called "consumer economy."
My
own guess about where this all leads is in the direction of more anger and
incoherence by all parties involved -- which will itself generate yet
more anger in a spiraling centrifugal feedback loop that could eventually
tear this nation apart. It will be instructive to see how some of these forces
play out in the Health Care Reform "summit" that President Obama
has called for this week. The Republicans will be rope-a-doped into the
uncomfortable position of trying to explain why they have no ideas whatsoever
about fixing the hopelessly cruel and unjust medical system that everybody
except government employees suffers under. The Democrats will be juked into the equally unhappy position of explaining how
a bankrupt US Treasury pays for a more equitable system -- and the insurance
companies will sit smirkingly on the sidelines
watching both parties fail to address the necessary severe disciplining of
the insurance racket.
In
the background of even these momentous deliberations, the foundations of
capital creak and shatter, the stock market infarcts and the bond market
fibrillates, and all the accounting tricks ever dreamed of in the fantasies
of Harvard MBAs and MIT math PhDs, and all the newly-evolved species of grifters and shysters who pull the levers of the system
will not avail to hold back our inexorable journey into new circumstances
that will really determine the outcome of these predicaments.
James Howard Kunstler
www.kunstler.com/
James Howard Kunstler’s
new novel of the post-oil future, World Made By Hand, is
available at all booksellers.
James Kunstler has worked
as a reporter and feature writer for a number of newspapers, and finally as a
staff writer for Rolling Stone Magazine. In 1975, he dropped out to write
books on a full-time basis.
His latest nonfiction book, "The Long
Emergency," describes the changes that American society faces in the
21st century. Discerning an imminent future of protracted socioeconomic
crisis, Kunstler foresees the progressive
dilapidation of subdivisions and strip malls, the depopulation of the
American Southwest, and, amid a world at war over oil, military invasions of
the West Coast; when the convulsion subsides, Americans will live in smaller
places and eat locally grown food.
You can purchase your own copy here
: The Long
Emergency . You
can get more from James Howard Kunstler - including
his artwork, information about his other novels, and his blog - at his Web
site : http://www.kunstler.com/
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